Jingle tills for Christmas

Maureen Ferrier

We Scots may be canny with money, but Christmas but we’re still going to be spending £1.84 billion, and giving 61.3 million presents this year.

And even at that level of spending, we’re not as generous a people in other areas of Britain – we’ll each spend £416.27 on average, buying 13.9 presents in total, with 7.9 people on our shopping lists. This compares to an average spend in Great Britain of £489.04, on 14.8 presents for 8.3 people.

And we will send fewer Christmas cards than the rest of Britain – responding to a survey a quarter of us of us said we wouldn’t send cards, compared with a British average of just 16 per cent who will not be clogging up the post.

But when we do send cards, we are traditional – only nine per cent of the cards we send will be e-cards, most will be traditional cards.

We’re canny shoppers – one in five of those who know how they’ll buy their Christmas gifts will do both their research and shopping in-store and a further 19 per cent of Scots will do their research online before buying in-store.

But our most popular method of shopping is to do both research and buying online with 41 per cent of us taking this option